On December 15, 2010, Darrell Gunter joined AIP in the newly created role of chief commercial officer. Before joining AIP, Darrell was executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Collexis Holdings, a developer of semantic search and knowledge discovery software and AIP's technology partner for UniPHY. Earlier in his career, Darrell was the senior vice president for sales and marketing for the Americas marketplace at Elsevier, where over an eleven-year tenure, he led the successful launch and growth of ScienceDirect. We wanted to introduce Darrell to you and give you an idea of how he will lead AIP's sales and marketing activities in the months to come.

The title of chief commercial officer is not very common. Can you please tell us about your role and responsibilities at AIP?

I think AIP's creation of the chief commercial officer position demonstrates a change in the way society publishers are organizing themselves. In looking at how AIP is positioning itself for the future – not only in its pursuit of short-term goals, but also of long-term value – the chief commercial officer is responsible for revisiting and closely examining all of AIP's current revenue channels, as well as new channels that can enhance AIP's relationships with its members and its authors. While AIP is a not-for-profit organization, it is still incumbent on the chief commercial officer to demonstrate that we are good stewards of AIP's assets. This will be evident in the choices we make, and those choices will be guided by how we believe we can best serve our markets and our authors.

The hiring of an individual at your level, and with your experience, invariably leads to dramatic change. Can you tell us about the transformation you envision for AIP and what your short-term and longer term goals are?

Yes. I think in looking ahead, you have to look at not only short term and long term goals, but also midterm goals. There's Track A, Track B and Track C.

Track A is to continue doing what AIP does well – delivering top-quality content to the author community and, at the same time, delivering top-quality products to the marketplace. We must make sure that we look at those enhancements that will improve productivity, not only for authors submitting manuscripts for peer review, but also those that will allow us to get content up on Scitation as rapidly as possible. We must also make sure that our user community has the best experience possible. In other words, we want to continue to do all the things that are of day-to-day importance to our customer base.

Track B, midterm, is a matter of assessing our resources, allocating them most effectively, and making sure our entire staff is on board with our goals and knows the direction we're headed.

Track C, long term, is about how AIP is currently organized and then, looking ahead, at what gaps we need to fill – gaps of performance, gaps of opportunity. For example, we've identified the importance of social media to the STM marketplace. And while we've done a pretty good job at sticking our toe in the water, there is so much more we can do. With this in mind, it probably makes sense to redirect those assets away from traditional tasks, which have lost relevance, to a greater concentration on perfecting our social media skills.

In looking at these gaps, we're making sure that we either bring in the folks that have the requisite experience to fill a particular gap or take some of our star players, provide training to develop their skills, and build the long-term roles for them that will keep AIP competitive and productive for the next 10–20 years.

For the customer, we want to make this transition as seamless as possible. We don't want them to even notice that change is taking place. We want them to reap the benefits without feeling any of the pain of getting there.

You have certainly had a great deal of experience in scholarly publishing. Can you please tell us how you intend to interact with librarians in your new role at AIP?

Staying close to customers and end users is very important. Working with librarians will require not only that we see them at library shows, but also that we see them in their workplace. And we don't only want interaction with librarians – we want to interact with the folks who are conducting research, teaching physics, and the folks who are taking classes as well.

So, we look at this type of interaction as another example of the change in values at AIP, and we'll continue to keep our eyes and ears open to feedback from our marketplace. I have yet to have a customer provide me with bad advice. The advice of the customer is always positive and always helpful. Working with our librarian friends, understanding the student, and listening to faculty will no doubt help us to be a better physics publisher.

Learn more about Darrell Gunter.